Big-budget Miniseries Go Out In Style

This season, viewers can bid farewell to the big-budget miniseries by watching one of the biggest. ABC`s War and Remembrance, which runs 32 hours at a cost of more than $100 million, begins Nov. 13.

War and Remembrance, the sequel to The Winds of War, was put into pre- production before cost-conscious Capital Cities purchased ABC, and it would have been too expensive to pull the plug once production began.

But consider it the swan song for lengthy miniseries. Cable and the availability of thousands of movies on video cassette have fragmented the captive audience that used to tune in to almost any miniseries.

ABC will air the first 18 hours of War and Remembrance in November. Robert Mitchum, Jane Seymour, Polly Bergen and Peter Graves reprise their roles in this adaptation of Herman Wouk`s novel of World War II; Hart Bochner and Sir John Gielgud take over roles originally played by Jan-Michael Vincent and John Houseman.

The rest of War and Remembrance, which is directed by Dan Curtis and produced by Barbara Steele (yes, the former horror-movie queen), airs in early 1989.

The remainder of the network miniseries for this season are smaller in budget and length, if not scale. NBC`s six-hour remake of Around the World in 80 Days stars Pierce Brosnan, Eric Idle, Julia Nickson, Peter Ustinov and Christopher Lee. David Niven starred in the original, with many Hollywood stars in cameo appearances.

NBC`s Favorite Son is a highly entertaining, six-hour political potboiler (adapted from a novel by former NBC executive Steve Sohmer), starring Harry Hamlin, Linda Kozlowski (`Crocodile` Dundee), Robert Loggia and James Whitmore. It`s about a deceitful, and ultimately murderous, campaign to elect a national hero to the presidency.

Other NBC miniseries include The Great Escape II (with Christopher Reeve), four hours; Brotherhood of the Rose, a four-hour adaptation of David Morrell`s novel about brother assassins, starring Peter Strauss; and Pursuit, a four- hour thriller set in the waning days of Nazi Germany, starring Veronica Hamel and Ben Cross.

CBS will air a four-hour miniseries about Jack the Ripper, starring Michael Caine as a Scotland Yard inspector, beginning Oct 23. Other CBS miniseries include Internal Affairs, based on a Robert Daley police novel and starring Richard Crenna and Kate Capshaw; and the first all-cartoon miniseries, This Is America, Charlie Brown!, featuring the Peanuts characters.

CBS also has put Larry McMurtry`s novel Lonesome Dove into production, to air as an eight-hour miniseries (starring Robert Duvall) sometime in the spring.